“Lisp is worth learning for the profound enlightenment experience you will have when you finally get it.” -Eric Raymond

Blub Paradox

“As long as our hypothetical Blub programmer is looking down the power continuum, he knows he’s looking down. Languages less powerful than Blub are obviously less powerful, because they’re missing some feature he’s used to. But when our hypothetical Blub programmer looks in the other direction, up the power continuum, he doesn’t realize he’s looking up.”

When to use a language?

Platform Mandate

Browsers use JavaScript

iOS uses Objective-C

Android uses Java

Server programming gives you more freedom

Language Fit

Statisticians use R

Engineers use Matlab

Language X may have the best library for Y

Speed/Scalability

Development time and execution time are often at odds

C is faster than Java is faster than Ruby

Ruby is easier than Java is easier than C

Some languages have better concurrency models

“If you have a choice of several languages, it is, all other things being equal, a mistake to program in anything but the most powerful one.” -Paul Graham, Beating the Averages